Personal Update

This is a personal update. It’s explaining what is going on in my life because as many of you probably know, things haven’t been good and also there’s something important about the project that I need to mention.

This is gonna get pretty heavy and mention poor mental health and abuse.

As you probably know, I made a call for help on Mastodon at the beginning of the new year because my enbyfriend and I were threatened with eviction by my abusive mother. My enbyfriend has no family essentially, the rest of my family are either also abusive pieces of shit or they just don’t care and we don’t have the kind of income or resources where just moving out ourselves is easy.

It turns out that those legal threats of eviction were smoke and mirrors like previous, more casual threats of eviction have been (this isn’t the first time). My mother is a habitual gaslighter who will escalate and deescalate a situation on a whim so that’s entirely possible, but at the same time when faced with the situation and the fact that the legal threats were being acted upon at the time, I *had* to call for help.

As I’ve mentioned before on my Mastodon, I only started looking for a new place by the end of January, because every day that month I was crying and was just trying to not have some kind of panic attack. I was in no fit condition to even start.

While I’m not that bad now, I’m still in this general state of anxiety and having to withhold doing things much longer than I’d like to.

So far I have managed to text as well as visit one landlord. It didn’t guarantee my enbyfriend and I a place to live (and I think that we’re not going to get it), but it was a relatively positive experience. (That being said, I was crying and close to breaking down the entire 1h walk back to the train station, just to give you an idea of how fragile I am.)

Being everyday me trying to do every day things is bad enough, but then living under an abusive household situation makes them even worse, and having to go out and talk to people and do all the things that actually involve trying to find a new place to live is another level to this mess of anxiety.

Plus my enbyfriend and I both have our own persistent personal issues which come and go which means we have to try to wait for things to align before we can do certain things together than that makes this situation even worse.

This inability to efficiently find new places to stay makes me more anxious because I know that I called for help and people are supporting me, probably expecting that things will happen. And while I am trying when I can, the effort-to-results ratio is so incredibly high it probably doesn’t seem like much has happened. And that is kinda the truth, but it’s just been because I’ve been so badly trying to just keep going that I don’t have the energy to do that much more than that.

I haven’t mentioned this, but for many months I have been working on Mutant Standard at a rate that is way more than healthy for me.

I’m finally feeling the effects of this overwork. In December/January, I started noticing that my emotions about the project and my ability to do a good job were starting to get really fucked up.

It’s one of the reasons why Mutant Standard updates have been slow recently, and if you’ve been following me on Mastodon, it’s why even more recently you would have seen this Mastodn UI prototype I was working on called Pineapple, but not any new emoji.

I felt this for many weeks, but I wasn’t sure where I was truly at because I can sometimes be rash about these kinds of things so I needed to give my feelings some time and see where things settle.

Now that I have, I’m announcing that I am taking a short break from Mutant Standard because I have to in order to continue doing it. I’m committed and I really want to keep going, but my emotional energy is already critical, and my emotional connection with the project has been badly damaged.

I hope to take about two weeks, but I can’t say for sure. When I return to Mutant Standard, my workload will be less by default because how I was working previously wasn’t sustainable.